Last week, the International Center for Photography in New York opened an exhibition of works by the great street and crime photographer Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), professionally known as Weegee because of his Ouija-board prescience about arriving at crime scenes so quickly. Also last week, Eastman Kodak—the company that made the kind of film Weegee and other major modern photographers relied on—declared bankruptcy. The end of traditional film photography was augured in the early 1990s, when digital cameras first started being sold, but Kodak’s demise signals yet another step in the march to its doom. It demonstrates that for all the darkroom holdouts, most people today use digital cameras for their photographs. Face it, darkroom fans, times have changed. Almost all images—including paintings—sooner or later land in someone’s computer. The whole world is pixelating, and hardly anybody...

For every college class of 20 or so beginning-drawing students, one or two show up with extraordinary drawing talent. I’m talking about students with a ready ability to see and draw shape, to see and draw in proportion, to draw to scale, to draw the symmetry of things, to sense visual balance, to place objects on a picture plane in an interesting way, and to use a sensitive touch in their mark and line. Talented drawing students not only find it fairly easy to make drawings where a doggie looks like a doggie, they also draw the doggie in a beautiful way that transcends mere mechanical imitation. Those of us who teach drawing know how to spot the super-talented drawing students on the first day of class—generally within the first 20 minutes. They always draw boldly from the get-go, using both their shoulder and arm, rather than merely the hand. Many of them show off at least a little ...

I stayed up last night to watch “Jacqueline Kennedy: In Her Own Words,” a special program, narrated by Diane Sawyer, on the eight and a half hours of private taped interviews made by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis four months after her husband’s assassination. I got to listen to that famous wispy, childlike Jackie voice (following Warhol's lead, I always refer to the woman as "Jackie") talking softly to her interviewer, Arthur Schlesinger, about what she thought of her husband and the people who surrounded him. In the background, you hear the sounds of an occasional clink of ice cubes (what was she drinking?), her children, and a match being lit (Jackie was a smoker). Jackie had requested the tapes not be released until 50 years after her death. But her daughter Caroline Kennedy, in an apparent deal with ABC to drop its plans for a miniseries based on the Kennedys, released them early. A ...

A few weeks ago, my colleague Doug Hilson and I chucked our respective spouses for the day and headed off to the Ulster County Fair, in New Paltz, New York. It wasn’t for the carnival booths and thrill rides, or the over-priced greasy pizza and cotton candy—all of which make me feel queasy—but a place for urbanites like us to see farm animals that have been raised on family farms instead of  factory farms. We began with the sheep, recently shorn and sporting fashionable blankets so they’d remain clean for the judging. The 4-H kids tending them were busy shoveling manure and distributing hay. The pigs were disappointing—only one breed—but the good news was they were hormone- and antibiotic-free, they were snorting about in a good-sized, clean pen, their owners were petting them and calling them by name, and their tails weren’t clipped, the way they are in factory farms. The goats gave us...

I'm not sure when American culture started to exist in quotation marks. But at this point the line between "real" and "farce" is so blurred as to no longer be meaningful.  The Daily Show gets awards as best news show, but considers itself a comedy show about the news. Certain "news" shows surely ought to get best awards for best comedies. The pop music one of my teenagers listens to is farce, I think. Like The Lonely Island's "No Homo," which suggests tongue and cheek that "when you want to compliment a friend, no homo, but you don't want that friendship to end, no homo, to tell a dude just how you feel, no homo, just say no homo so he knows the deal." The compliments for your friend include "I like the way your shoulders fill out that shirt" and "I kinda like your natural scent, no homo, and I kinda like the musical Rent no homo." This sort of tongue in cheek homoerotic homophobia is...

Last week, The Boston Globe ran an article about the decline of the final exam. Professors, it seems, are increasingly omitting final examinations at the end of their courses. The conclusion, although anecdotal, is that this is happening not in a few isolated places, but all around the country. Harvard offers a case study. According to the Globe, last spring only 259 of 1,137 Harvard undergraduate courses scheduled final exams, the lowest number since 2002. The Times' “Today’s idea” section repeated the story a few days ago, including the caveat that “serious pedagogical questions about 21st century education” are raised by the decline in giving finals. The questions that are inevitably dragged into the discussion are,  “How best do students learn? And what’s the best way to assess that?"

Educators are obsessed with pinning down the answer to “How are students best educated?”  Yet the...